A New York trip built around the weeks hotels get cheap

Dishes to know

Bacon, egg and cheese (BEC)

A griddled egg sandwich with bacon and melted American cheese on a roll, made to order at a bodega deli counter.

Breakfast food, roughly 6am to noon. You order at the grill in a run-on sentence, salt-pepper-ketchup, and eat it walking. Many Muslim-owned delis do halal beef or turkey versions instead of pork.

Chopped cheese

Ground beef and onions chopped together with cheese on the flat-top and served on a hero with lettuce and tomato.

A Harlem and Bronx bodega sandwich, strongest uptown and in the Bronx. A downtown restaurant version at triple the price means you’re in the wrong place.

Halal cart platter

Chicken or lamb over yellow rice with salad, white sauce and hot sauce, from a street cart.

Peak demand is weekday lunch and late night, outside hospitals and campuses and wherever people have been drinking. Carts with a line of construction and hospital workers turn over their meat fastest.

Hand-pulled or knife-cut noodles (lamian / dao xiao mian)

Wheat noodles stretched or shaved to order and served in cumin-lamb or beef broth preparations.

A Northwestern Chinese format from Lanzhou, Xi’an and Dongbei, found in Flushing and Sunset Park basements and food courts rather than in Manhattan’s Cantonese Chinatown.

Momo

Nepali and Tibetan steamed or fried dumplings, usually pork, chicken or vegetable, with a tomato-sesame chutney.

The Jackson Heights and Elmhurst staple, sold from restaurants and small counters, and in warm months from vendors on the sidewalk and in the parks along Roosevelt Avenue.

Cantonese dim sum

Small steamed and fried plates such as har gow, siu mai, cheung fun and egg tarts, eaten as a shared mid-morning meal.

A daytime meal, generally ending by mid-afternoon. The busiest rooms on Sunday morning, the ones full of multigenerational families, are cooking the most turnover.

Appetizing counter fare (bagel with lox, whitefish salad)

Cured and smoked fish, cream cheese and salads sold at a Jewish ‘appetizing’ counter, separate historically from a meat deli.

Weekend-morning food. The tell of a serious counter is fish hand-sliced to order rather than pre-packed, plus a ticket-number system.

Hot pastrami on rye

Brined, smoked and steamed beef navel or brisket, hand- or machine-sliced, on rye with mustard.

A lunch-counter item rather than a dinner one. Mustard only, and asking for mayonnaise or cheese marks you as a tourist. Real versions are steamed to order rather than sliced cold.

Arepa / empanada (Colombian and Ecuadorian)

Griddled corn cakes with cheese, or fried filled pastries, from Latin American bakeries and street griddles.

Evening and weekend street food along Roosevelt Avenue west of 74th Street and in Corona, often sold alongside grilled-meat plates.

Trinidadian doubles / West Indian roti

Curried chickpeas between two fried flatbreads, or a large wrapped curry roti, from Caribbean counters.

Breakfast and all-day cheap food in Flatbush, Crown Heights and Richmond Hill. Doubles are ordered by pepper level, so say ‘slight’ if you’re unsure.

Where to eat

Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, Queens

The densest walkable stretch in the country for Nepali, Tibetan, Indian, Bangladeshi, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Mexican and Thai food, with the South Asian core around 74th Street and Latin American food along Roosevelt Avenue. People eat here because it’s their neighbourhood.

Flushing, Queens

The city’s largest Chinese enclave, with regional cooking from across China plus Korean food along Northern Boulevard. The basement and mall food courts near Main Street are where you eat several regions in one sitting.

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Two adjacent food cultures on one hill. A Fujianese-founded Chinatown along Eighth Avenue, and a Mexican and Central American strip along Fifth Avenue, both cheap and both aimed at residents.

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

The Arab commercial spine along Fifth Avenue, with Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni and Egyptian bakeries, butchers, sweet shops and grill houses. Late hours and heavy family trade.

Belmont, the Bronx

An Italian-American food street that still works as a shopping district, with butchers and bakers and cheese shops and pasta makers feeding local kitchens, and a growing Albanian and Mexican presence around it.

What to walk past

Anything on or immediately off Times Square, the blocks ringing Rockefeller Center and Hudson Yards, and Mulberry Street in Little Italy. A host standing on the pavement waving a laminated menu at you is the trap signal in this city and it never misses. The other tells are photographs of every dish on the menu, a menu covering four unrelated cuisines, ‘World Famous’ on the awning, and a mandatory drink minimum or a large automatic ‘service charge’ that isn’t the tip.

Markets

Essex Market (Lower East Side, Manhattan)

Mon-Wed 8am-8pm, Thu-Sat 8am-9pm, Sun 10am-6pm, individual vendor hours vary

A century-old public market rehoused across the street, mixing long-standing Latino and Jewish grocers with newer prepared-food stalls. Downtown it’s a rare place to shop and eat in the same room.

Union Square Greenmarket (Manhattan)

Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 8am-6pm, year-round

The city’s flagship farmers market, and where a lot of restaurant cooks shop. Go on Saturday morning, when the regional produce and the cider and fish stalls explain what seasonal means here.

Arthur Avenue Retail Market (Belmont, the Bronx)

Generally daytime hours Mon-Sat, reduced or closed Sunday, check before travelling

An indoor 1940s market built to get pushcarts off the street, still holding butchers and produce stalls and cheese and sandwich counters. One room, and it explains the Bronx’s Italian food trade better than any street.

New World Mall food court and the Main Street basement courts, Flushing

Daily, roughly late morning to late evening, hours vary by stall

Dozens of independent stalls covering many Chinese regional cuisines side by side, ordered by pointing, at prices that make grazing across four regions in one lunch realistic.

When people eat

Breakfast is early and portable, from about six in the morning at a deli or cart counter. Lunch compresses into the middle two hours of the day, which is when the counter formats move fastest. Dinner runs later than most of the US. Seven to nine is normal, and outer-borough immigrant restaurants often serve past 11pm, with Flushing, Jackson Heights and Bay Ridge all keeping real late-night trade. A 5:30pm dinner in Manhattan is a pre-theatre or tourist slot. A half-empty dining room at 8pm on a Friday is a warning sign.

Eating cheaply

Eat standing up and off the subway map. The cheap formats are the bodega griddle for egg sandwiches and chopped cheese, the halal cart platter, the dumpling and noodle window, the Chinese food court stall where you order by pointing, the West Indian roti and doubles counter, the Latin American bakery counter, and the by-the-slice pizza window. Chinatown and Roosevelt Avenue lunch specials do the same work, as does any place with a photo menu on the wall rather than in your hand. One transfer out to Flushing, Sunset Park or Jackson Heights buys a materially better meal than the same money spent in midtown. On tipping, a table with waiter service expects 18-20%. At a counter, cart, window or food court where you pay before eating, no tip is required and a dollar or rounding up is generous, so ignore the 20/25/30% prompts a card reader shows you at a takeaway counter. Sales tax of 8.875% is added at the register, so menu prices are never the final number.

If you don't eat everything

Vegetarian

Easy to the point of being trivial, if you go where vegetarian cooking is native rather than accommodated. South Indian and Gujarati kitchens in Jackson Heights, Curry Hill and Jersey-adjacent Queens, Chinese Buddhist restaurants and Middle Eastern mezze counters all have full meatless menus. A few Indian restaurants are fully vegetarian or Jain-friendly, so ask for ‘Jain, no onion no garlic’ if that applies to you. In Latin American and Chinese kitchens, ask whether soup bases and rice use chicken stock or lard.

Gluten free

Manageable but it means asking every time. Corn-tortilla Mexican food, Vietnamese rice-noodle dishes, South Indian dosa and idli (rice and lentil), and steak-and-salad American menus are the natural fits. Avoid the wheat-noodle Northwestern Chinese formats, dumplings, halal-cart pita and bagels and pizza, and treat soy sauce and shared fryers as the two main cross-contamination risks. Chain and mid-market restaurants label allergens more reliably than small immigrant-run counters, where the answer may be uncertain.

Halal and other

Halal is the easiest major dietary requirement in New York. Street carts across Manhattan are overwhelmingly halal, and Bay Ridge, Astoria’s Steinway strip, Jackson Heights, Kensington and Parkchester have whole commercial districts of halal butchers and bakeries and restaurants. Kosher is well covered too, concentrated in Midwood, Borough Park, Crown Heights, the Upper West Side and parts of Queens. Certification is usually posted in the window, and many kosher places close from Friday afternoon through Saturday night.